Nicholas Carr's book is called The Shallows but his argument isn't much
deeper, writes Milo Yiannopoulos.

It's fitting, though almost too obvious a joke to make, that Nicholas Carr's new book, out in the UK next month, is called The Shallows. Because that title describes the quality of his arguments, which seek to prove that the internet is causing irreversible damage to our thought processes and "making us stupid", really rather well. They're asinine, often based on selective quotations and often failing to differentiate between correlation and causation. In fact, it's difficult to summarise just how dodgy his thesis is in the space we have available. But let me try, by calling on people who really know about this stuff.

Like Carr's own sources, for example. As detailed in the Guardian by John Harris, Scott Karp, editor of Publish2, is presented in the The Shallows as struggling with full-length books. The implication is that a lifetime spent online has "rewired" his brain so he can no longer concentrate for long on a sustained narrative. But that's not entirely true: "As it turns out, Karp has only stopped reading non-fiction. Contrary to Carr's thesis, he says he still has no problem reading novels, and thinks his long-term memory is in as good shape as ever."

Each of Carr's witness statements seems to unravel after a bit of prodding. He uses the work of Gary Small, whose book, iBrain: surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind, is the theoretical bedrock of The Shallows, to cast chilling predictions about the future. Small is invoked as the academic authority behind Carr's disturbing warnings that excessive use of the internet might cause permanent changes to the way our brains work. Again, not quite right. "The brain can right itself if we're aware of these issues," Small told the Guardian.

Then there's the New York Times op-ed by renowned psychology professor Steven Pinker, who appeared to dismiss Carr's book out of hand. "Such panics often fail basic reality checks," he wrote, "The effects of consuming electronic media are [...] likely to be far more limited than the panic implies."

Here are two more observations from American readers, who have had time to chew over Carr's book. One, the hypothesis that we're no longer capable of immersing ourselves in complex, nuanced narratives and arguments is destroyed by user behaviour in online role-playing games. Two, Carr's fetishisation of "books" ignores the quality of the actual book being read, seeming to assume that the ideas in books are of intrinsically better quality.

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I could go on, but I won't. Carr's writing is undeniably engaging, and his thesis was fascinating - brilliant, even - as an essay, the form in which it originally appeared in Atlantic magazine. But as a book, it simply does not stand up to scrutiny, as expert after expert now seems to be saying.

Since Carr's book seems to be based mainly on personal experience and anecdote, let me offer my own. I'm what you might call an internet obsessive: I spend almost every waking hour connected in some way, whether it's on a computer, a phone or some other internet-enabled device. And yes, have noticed that I skim blog posts of more than six paragraphs, and that I often have a lot of stuff going on at once, and a number of programs - Skype, Twitter, my browser. my mail client - all vying for my attention at once. But it's precisely the mental agility I've had to develop to deal with that which has, in my mind, made me better able to grasp complex arguments in longer books.

Sure, for the first half an hour of reading, I do get distracted, wondering what's happening on Facebook, or who's chatting to whom on Twitter. But after that, once I get settled, I can read "proper books" for literally days on end. It feels to me more like parallel "modes of thinking", which you can develop independently and which complement each other. It might take a little time to code-switch (like it can take a while to readjust socially when you stumble out of a nightclub and straight into work in your early twenties), but I don't feel as though I'm losing any of my faculties as a result of being permanently connected. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Is the net making us stupid? Almost certainly not. "Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart," says Pinker. But after reading The Shallows, I worry what excessive exposure to it has done to Nicholas Carr.

The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember Nicholas Carr Atlantic Books, £16.99